Posted: Mar 26, 2010 10:05 am
However, I gained the impression that Shermer managed to demolish most of Chopra's arguments in advance!
Thanks, and I mean TY, Shermer's arguments gave me a healthy dose of much needed skepticism, and he was so elegant, unthreatning and so much more mature than Chopra.
BTW you don't need much to refute Chopra's claims, since he just grabs all nonsense he can find and bags it all together.
But he does make an interesting point (it's probably the only time and last one in my life that you'll find me defending Chopra):
"Leaving out the heart of the matter, as Shermer does, smacks of unfairness, for I rely on this same Dutch study and give all the particulars. Skepticism is only credible when it’s not being devious. But Shermer often deliberately misses the point. I cite a University of Virginia study that to date has found over 2,000 children who vividly remember their past lives. In many cases they can name places and dates. The facts they relate have been verified in many cases. Even more astonishing, over 200 of these children exhibit birthmarks that resemble the way they remember dying in their most recent lifetime. (One boy, for example, recalled being killed with a shotgun, and his chest exhibited a scatter-shot of red birthmarks). Unable to refute this phenomenon or imagine a counter-study, Shermer fails to mention it."
The statistical probability of birthmarks occuring according to Stevenson, is around 1/25500 or something like that (it's availabe on the skeptic.com/stevenson site), why is it so high (around 0.35) then?, in many repeated studies?. That's over 10^4 % increment from the standard.
Its not like the psi research that it states, because there was a 10% increase of the avarage we should consider psi to exist... in that case yes I would question the method utilized to reach such slim margin.
The methodology alone is not enough to rebuke the "reincarnation" studies, and most of the counter arguments still fail to explain a large number of these cases, which are unresolved as so far.